Paint is a multibillion-dollar product in the United States, and it's one of the few products that is growing in sales despite the recession. Sales are expected to reach $12.5 billion in 2010, according to the Home Improvement Research Institute, and that huge market has manufacturers introducing multiple brands through a constantly shifting array of retailers.
A trend in the industry is the recent recognition of women as important decision makers in the do-it-yourself (DIY) market, altering the way the industry does business. Both Lowe's and Home Depot reported in 2001 that over 50 percent of their customer base was female. With an influx of women shoppers into the DIY market, home improvement and specialty stores alike are working hard to organize their stores to be bright, open, and attractive to women. New offerings include in-store design centers, more designer paint brands, and more extensive paint color samples. For example, Benjamin Moore & Co. offers approximately 3,200 colors of paint and can match almost any color using its Color Preview System. (The Color Preview Fan Deck is a compact, portable fan deck comprising a vast number of paint samples on individual cards. The Color Preview palette is divided into Organic and Inorganic colors to allow for easy reference of clean true colors versus complex, natural colors.)
Too often, however, the impetus among amateur remodelers of homes who paint or finish rooms or furniture within those homes are motivated by a desire to match a particular look or, importantly, a particular color or set of colors within a vision of a room. Fan decks are not as helpful in this regard and near matches generally characterize selections. For example, a collector of antiques and curios might own a treasured piece that is to be the centerpiece of the room as finished. For example, a Fuzhou Bodiless Lacquer Chest from the Qing Dynasty might well be selected as a dominate piece in a room. Fuzhou bodiless lacquer is firm and light, unique and elegant, with magnificent and bright color and luster. A fan deck might provide a red in the vicinity of the Fuzhou Lacquer but may include other tints that detract from the purity of Qing Dynasty Red.
Nonetheless, it is highly desirable to acquire a paint that will match this piece precisely. Spectrophotometry is fairly well-known art and is used at many endeavors that range from matching replacement enamel to existing teeth in a patient's mouth in dentistry to selecting cultured bacteria based upon color reflectance. In order to use spectrophotometery for tinting paints, the user must additionally exploit a computer. The light reflected from the object to be matched is compared to known responses of the sensor within the spectrophotometer to known colors. By means of nonlimiting examply, the TAOS/Parallax TCS230 color-matching program measures color by comparision to known colors. Color matching is done using a “minimax” approach in the RGB color space. In this method, the distance between two colors is the absolute value of the difference between the RGB component that differs most:Di=max{|R−R|, |G−Gi|, |B−Bi|}
where R, G, and B are the red, green, and blue coordinates of the color being scanned; and Ri, Gi, and Bi are the coordinates of stored color i. The color with the closest match is taken to be the one whose is the smallest, i.e. Di is the smallest, i.e. minimizing the maximum difference. Hence the term “minimax”.
In such an instance, however, the stored colors are limited in number and generally are selected to represent a single company's offerings. For example, one such instrument is the Benjamin Moore™ Pocket Palette™ is a hand held electronic color palette search instrument. “With only one press of a button, Pocket Palette utilizes X-Rite's™ proprietary color measurement technology to accurately read and display the correct Benjamin Moore paint color name and number, taking the guess work out of matching colors.” Nonetheless, the user still cannot use the device for much more than the narrowing of choices
Even given the assistance the Benjamin Moore™ device might yield, that assistance does not help in the estimation of quantities of paint nor of selection of complementary colors. Nor does it assist the user in the actual purchase of paints necessary to meet their needs.
What is needed in the art is a device to assist a user in the selection and purchase of tints to prepare paints to match selected colors.